Push back against the billionaire-owned social media. I just got my news feed about local events from our snappily-dressed town crier. #events #newsfeedlocal #newsfeed

another part of my day job involves working around systems designed to prevent mass AI-driven scraping, because humans and well-behaved query scripts are accidentally caught up in all the war-of-the-scrapers, because Cloudflare etc are offering what seems to management to be a magic bullet, and putting the bluntest of tools in front of anywhere that needs to be public, including APIs.
#scraping #api

Part of my day job involves using APIs to retrieve public data from third party public websites, some of which were never designed to publish raw data, so I tread lightly, no more than a human-driven query.
Part of my day job is preventing third party machines from hammering servers I run by incessant mass scraping - hundreds of thousands of ridiculous requests humans would never do or want (typically that's AI-driven scraping that doesn't abide by robots.txt).
I feel conflicted.
#scraping #api

Weather has been rather splendid in the west of England this weekend, got a few good rides on the bicycle.
That did spot a few niggles - some poorly fitting mudgards that have always been wobbling and sometimes rubbing, the ping bell was designed for handlebars wider than mine and was wobbling, and the suspension forks top cap was missing.
A bit of TPU filament, a Prusa i3, and @FreeCAD and the bike is ready for far more adventures and less wobbles.
#cycling #making #freecad.

Watching telly with adverts. Can't believe that Vitality Healthcare should choose "Enola Gay" by OMD as music. A song that is literally about the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of people, not about healthy living or health care. #inappropriate

Thought: has anyone managed to reprogram cheap commodity Christmas light controllers to remove the epillepsy-inducing strobe light flashing modes entirely?
Also, remember the last used setting on power restore.
Gentle fades and constant to remain available.

Then how do we introduce that in as a supply-chain attack to prevent such nastiness getting to market?

#microcontrollers #led #ChristmasDecor

#IPv6 scores of big internet destinations (vaguely working day related)
Microsoft (inc GitHub,bing): 6/10
Google: 10/10
Twitter: 0/10
Mastodon: (depends on instance). 10/10
Amazon: 9/10
Cloudflare: 10/10
Reddit:0/10
Duckduckgo: 0/10
Apple: 10/10
Hetzner:10/10
Toggl: 0/10
eBay: 0/10
AliExpress:0/10

Scores based on regular user experience. It should all just work, the user shouldn't notice any lack of functionality with IPv4 disabled.

Or course, the systems I look after would score 10/10.

and twitter, ebay, and @BBCRD BBC but then I don't use Twitter any more.

Oh, and the Microsoft Teams seems to get stuck on 'Loading latest updates... in the meantime, you can still send and respond to messages'

Skype still needs IPv4, despite no longer being a peer-to-peer protocol. I don't use Skype regularly these days.

Aside from that, I can do my general day job without IPv4.

Time for my regular experiment of seeing how much of my work still needs IPv4. So far I've had IPv4 disabled on my desktop for 4 hours and not noticed anything but duckduckgo and github broken. #NoNATNovember #ipv6only #ipv6

Today I've spent ages trying to get to terms with servers that have IPv6 DNS but aren't actually listening on IPv6 and some client libraries that have recently updated and will now (quite rightly, actually) refuse to fallback to IPv4. #ipv6

Just noticed that Tesco are now putting anti-shoplifting tags on swedes. Yes. A simple root vegetable is now apparently being pilfered in sufficient quantities to warrant that.

Whoah, @jayforeman . Google have made their motorways blue on Google Maps.

Pet internet peeve: News websites that don't date their articles, but will repost links to old articles on social media pretending that it's news. I blame Wordpress. #wordpress #news #ux

Just had an unsolicited SMS message purportedly from HMRC inviting me to submit personal information to a website because I need to do a tax return.

I know how these scams work.
Oh. It's real.